[GUSDEV] Database Drivers in GUS

[Michael S. <msa...@pc...>]

Note:

Here at CBIL, we've recently switched to use the Oracle OCI drivers for
database connections (instead of the pure-Java thin drivers).  While the OCI
drivers provide some additional necessary functionality for us, we've run in
to an issue that the underlying C libraries for OCI can only be loaded once
in each class loader.

This has created an issue particularly when running under Tomcat-- Tomcat
recommends there be one single OCI jar for the entire server; our model is
to have each webapp have lib coming as a symlink from the GUS home.  Of
course, the OCI jars could be removed from the GUS homes, but this would
cause compile issues as well as affect non-tomcat functionality (i.e. WDK
cli access).

The solution we've devised is to create a db_driver directory in each
lib/java directory that will contain Postgres and Oracle drivers.  This way,
the non Tomcat utilities can directly access the requisite jars, and they
will not be visable to Tomcat.

All project components that use DB drivers should conform to this new
policy, since they have the potential to impact other projects that need
this structure.

If there are suggestions for a better way to address this, we'd really
appreciate the feedback.

Thanks,

Mike